Blogs

This blog will talk and educate the reader on how to debug Mondrian Cubes.

Question: How to look at the queries that Mondrian generates while the user is navigating the OLAP cube. ? It’s really useful to look at Mondrian log files because they give us a lot of useful information about how our system is behaving. We can
o look at sql statements and MDX queries,
o Have some profiling information on queries that are executed,
o Get other useful debugging information.

The following Steps illustrate how to enable Mondrian debugging logs, adding some properties to the Mondrian configuration file. After that, we’ll configure two new log4j appenders to have the desired log files properly written on our file system.

Step 1: Enable Mondrian debug log – Mondrian has a big set of configuration settings that can be modified. In our case, to enable Mondrian debug information follow the steps detailed below: Open the mondrian.properties file located in <bi-server_home>/pentaho-solution/system/mondrian and add the following line.
mondrian.rolap.generate.formatted.sql=true

Step 2: Update log4j configuration
At this point we’re going to modify the log4j configuration file adding the required appenders categories to have our logging information displayed properly Open the log4j.xml file located in <bi-server_home>/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/classes Based on what you want to log, add the one or each of the following lines to the file. They will create two new RollingFileAppenders. You’re free to use the kind of appender you prefer.

Example: Location of log4j.xml file

D:\Installation Softwares\Pentaho\biserver-ce-4.8.0-stable\biserver-ce\tomcat\webapps\pentaho\WEB-INF\classe Add the following code.

NOTE: The code is already available within the file.. Just we need to un-comment.

Step 3: Enable the new log settings To have the new log settings enabled restart the Pentaho bi-server instance.

Log files location
D:\Installation Softwares\Pentaho\biserver-ce-4.8.0-stable\biserver-ce\tomcat\logs
After restarting the server and when you run the CUBE-OLAP…
You can find the following two files in the above location.

Files are:
i) Mondrian_mdx.log
ii) Mondrian_sql.log

Now, Enjoy analysing SQL queries that generated while performing run actions in various tools like Pentaho Analyser, Saiku Analysis.